This section provides background information related to the present disclosure which is not necessarily prior art.
Chirality of gold and other nanoparticles (NPs) has been actively studied in the last decade of nanoscience research, due to its wide range of possible applications. The interest in the synthesis of chiral nanostructures has been fueled by the potential application of chiral nano structures in bio sensing, telecommunication, display technologies, diffraction-free patterning, and chiral catalysis. Certain materials with nanoscale chirality are known to strongly rotate the polarization of linearly polarized (LinP) and circularly polarized light (CPL). Such optical effects in nano materials with different chiral geometries are being actively investigated as a part of chiral photonics and plasmonics. The opposite effects, i.e., the transfer of spin angular momenta of circularly polarized photons to matter and its subsequent nanoscale or atomic restructuring, retaining the “memory” of circular polarization, are not well known or understood.
Conventionally, in order to impart chirality, biological chiral ligands are used in conjunction with precursors to make chiral nanoparticles and chiral structures, for instance L-glutathione ligand or amino acid ligands. Natural amino acids and sugars exist predominantly as left-handed (LH) and right-handed (RH) enantiomers, respectively. However, associating ligands with nanoparticles requires additional processing steps and limits the types of nanoparticle structures and compositions that can be formed. It would be desirable to have a new technique for induced restructuring of NP systems, thus providing a new, powerful, and versatile tool for nanochemistry of chiral materials.